Thing on the cheek. Been there forever. What the hell?
What is it?
One of those things you finally pay attention to,
knowing somehow it's been there all along but has never drawn your
awareness enough to take into account. Now that it has, it's front
and center, so much so its mystery obsesses him to the exclusion of
all else. Blocks context, immediate memory including whatever outlook
held sway.
Conclusions leap to and fro. A tear. No. Would have
dried long ago. And what emotion might have caused it that wouldn't
outlast something so mundane as a tear? Water? From where? And only
one drop? Nonsense. It's imaginary by now, whatever its cause. More
than memory. Sparked into permanence by the stark effect of its
appearance, its utter contrast with the context it supplanted.
What could do this? Something primal, had to be.
Wriggled down through an evolutionary strata to a once vital nerve
center, an ancient survival algorithm so smothered by centuries of
social priorities its signals are all but ignored outside the most
clamant demands. Relief, maybe, from some unacknowledged primal
torment? No again. Relief is fleeting. This continues to disturb, if
only by implication, with its essence: the livid power of a single
drop. It could be blood.
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